In the olden days, all you needed was two families, a roughly common vocabulary and some domestic pets, and a community was born. That all ended at about the same time as innocence. Between innocence and today, there was an interim period in which communities didn't exist, until something devastating and usually gory happened to a definable area, upon which the community would spring into being in order to be 'rocked'.

Now, it's found a new home in the heart of the centre-left. 'Community' is a third-way classic, appropriated as a nicer, warmer way of talking about society. The reason they abandoned 'society' in the first place was that they needed a word without connotations of an ideological framework underpinned by hot-blooded redistribution. Community was ideal, because of its milky and unambitious nature.

In the beginning, it was a machiavellian kind of word-switch, designed to enact a subtle change in ideology and bring us round to the idea that lefties didn't have to take all our money; they might only need a bit of it. Now, people who use the word 'community' don't have a thought in their heads, apart from some vague notion that people should be nicer to one another. It's talk like that that makes normal people want to break windows.